AERO - A Physically Based Simulation and Animation System

Description

AERO is a simulation program based on rigid body
systems. With the built-in 3D editor you can create a virtual scene consisting
of spheres, boxes (cuboids), cylinders and plains. These objects may be
connected with links like spring, damper, rod and joint.

Now the simulation can be started and all objects obey to the laws of
physics. That means gravitation, air resistance, friction and all additonal user
defined forces are taken into account and set the scene into motion. You can
watch this sequence similar to watching a video tape: play the scene or step
back to memory positions and replay or you can "wind" back to the beginning or
forward to the end of the scene.

In addition AERO is capable of creating scene files for the raytracing
program POV-Ray out of these sequences. This means you can create fully rendered
animation sequences, e.g. MPEG videos.

News 26.02.2001

For quite a while there weren't many
news about AERO to tell. Slowly but steady the development went on, but
we all had very little time for programming on AERO. In addition
AERO was not in a state where it was suited for a general open source
release: it had only German source text comments and needed some major redesign
to make it easier to add new features.

This is now about to change. AERO is moving to another release. The
first step was to give AERO a new web site http://www.aero-simulation.de/, the
one you are looking at right now. So if yo were redirected here from any old
site, please update your bookmarks.

The next change is that I'm currently converting the whole program to C++.
There we can use the concept of object oriented programming which makes quite a
lot things much easier. And at the same time any extensions like additional
raytracer modules or support for additional bodies will get easier to implement.
And as these changes are so extensive anyway, I'll also translate everything to
English as a side effect. I hope this will make it easier for all people out
there so that we get lots of ideas and improvements for AERO in the
future.

Currently I already have built a class CBody which is a base
class for all bodies. The well known bodies SPHERE, CUBOID, CYLINDER, PLANE, and
POINT are also available as classes. The module that used to be called
koerper.c is already converted. Now the computation modules are
next. Once the whole program uses these classes, I'll change the vector and
matrix arrays to classes also. This will make computation look a lot clearer.
Then I'll change the output modules that draw the elements to the screen or to a
file for the raytracer.

So as you can see this will not be yet another small update with only a few
bug fixes. This will be a major new release which will move AERO to V2.
So please don't be disappointed if this still takes a few days.

Now we all have a mail address at the new AERO domain
aero-simulation.de. As you can guess these are obviously only mail
aliases, so don't be surprised if you send a request to one of these addresses
and we answer from a totally different one.

Usually on the old web page there was a section here offering links for
downloading AERO and looking at some example images created with
AERO. This section is temporary unavailable as I'm setting up this new
site step by step. All this stuff will reappear soon.